The Great Lover (40 page)

JILL DAWSON
is an award-winning poet and the author of five previous novels, including
Fred and Edie
, which was short-listed for the Whitbread Novel Award and the Orange Prize. She lives in Cambridgeshire, England, with her husband and two sons.

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‘Brooke’s narrative has been skilfully created from his own writings and Dawson’s imagination, and the result is compelling and convincing. Dawson gives us a Brooke who is by turns engaging and infuriating–and, one suspects, much like the real thing. It is a remarkable feat of imaginative empathy, brilliantly counterpointed with Nellie’s half-enchanted, half-aghast but rather more down-to-earth appraisal of “the Great Lover” and his bohemian circle’

Peter Parker,
Sunday Times

‘Brooke was a troubled man, confused about his sexuality and worried about his own sanity–and it is this darkness that Jill Dawson brings vividly to life. She has created a psychologically convincing picture of a man who, even in his many flirtatious moments, is teetering on the edge, and a brilliant account of the poet’s nervous breakdown…
The Great Lover
has many wonderful scenes…But it is remarkable principally for its Rupert Brooke, glorious in all his agony and shame, particularly as he sees his sanity slipping away from him’

Lorna Bradbury,
Daily Telegraph

‘This brilliant, complicated man is the centre of Jill Dawson’s
The Great Lover
, and while she draws extensively on historical records of Brooke and his contemporaries, it is her decisions as a novelist that make this account of his life fascinating as well as faithful’

Helen Dunmore,
The Times

‘Nell is a wonderful creation: resilient, intelligent and heart-breakingly innocent, she represents the other, working-class England that often gets overlooked in accounts of “giddy young people sleepwalking towards war”, as Dawson puts it…most of all, her novel digs Brooke out of that corner of a foreign field that is forever cliché’

Lisa Mullen,
Time Out

‘Not only engaging and seductive, it is also clever, witty and artfully designed…Dawson is a fine impressionistic writer–outstanding is a kiss which takes place among Nell’s beehives, an erotic, subversive wedding tableau–and this is a novel of scents and savours, of both love and “Lust’s remembered smells”’

Stephanie Cross,
Times Literary Supplement

‘To contrast with the flighty Brooke, Dawson invents Nell, a brilliant creation–honest, stubborn and grounded…a seductive book, evocative and well paced, the tale split between Brooke and Nell, the two narrative voices strong, distinctive and consistent…Written about a poet by a poet,
The Great Lover
in some ways seems to reveal more of what we’d like to think of as the “real” Brooke than various biographers have done to date.’

Vanessa Curtis,
Scotland on Sunday

‘To translate this well-known figure into a novel, with all his contradictions, requires capacious knowledge and a gifted imagination. Fiction and fact are here blended with sureness and subtlety’

Frances Spalding,
Independent

‘Seamlessly weaving together snippets of Brooke’s letters and poems with her own lively prose, Dawson delivers a story that is both entertaining and evocative…Dawson’s novel transcends the historical facts and truly comes to life. In Brooke, her effortless blending of the known details of his life–his fraught love affairs, travels and development as a poet–with a vivid emotional portrait creates a character of real complexity…More to the point, by endowing him with self-deprecating humour and warmth, Dawson manages to conjure up the legendary charm that seemed to bewitch every woman, and many of the men, Brooke met.’

Catherine Heaney,
Irish Times

‘I have read it twice. The first time at speed, for its onrushing vigour and narrative pull; the second, more slowly, allowing proper time to test the sentences, savour the detail of English society in the handful of years preceding the First World War, and most pleasing of all, to enjoy the author’s obvious relish of the novel’s central, teasingly rendered romance between Rupert Brooke and Nellie Golightly…The speed and rhythms of rural life, and the greater sense of the wider world of pre-war turbulence, of suffragettes laying siege to the status quo, and artists’ coteries flouting convention–all this is rendered so unfussily, and in writing polished for clarity, not dazzling effect, that the reading becomes an almost physical pleasure.’

Tom Adair,
Scotsman

‘Gloriously, it is love rather than death that preoccupies Jill Dawson in her distinctive and deeply imagined portrait of Brooke…its heroine, and the woman planted exquisitely at its centre, is Nell Golightly, an orphaned bee-keeper’s daughter, who despite being self-avowedly “sensible”, becomes inexorably snared by the beautiful young poet…The narrative, alternating between the voices of Brooke and Nell, charts a mutual fascination blossoming against a backdrop of Fabian politics, bee-keeping, the Suffrage movement, the intrigues of the Bloomsbury set and the poet’s mental collapse…Jill Dawson has created a world of huge pathos; a subtle, evocative anti-fairy-tale of doomed youth by one of Britain’s most subtle and accomplished writers.’

Liz Jensen,
Waterstone’s Books Quarterly

Watch Me Disappear

Wild Boy

Fred & Edie

Magpie

Trick of the Light

This book was originally published in Great Britain in 2009 by Sceptre, an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton, a Hachette Livre UK company.

THE GREAT LOVER
. Copyright © 2009 by Jill Dawson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST U.S. EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dawson, Jill.

The great lover: a novel/Jill Dawson.—1st U.S. ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-06-192436-1

1. Brooke, Rupert, 1887–1915—Fiction. 2. Poets, English—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6054.A923G74 2010

823'914—dc22         2009036539

EPub Edition © April 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-200359-1

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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